Independence Day Quotes
Despite the name, this is not a page about the American Fourth of July. It is built from the freedom and patriotism pages, and the writers who turn up come from all over: the Puerto Rican poet Julia de Burgos, the Italian anarchist Bruno Filippi, Shakespeare, Anna Quindlen. De Burgos has a line about an invaded nation where today’s battlefield is independence.
A few entries are there because of a keyword, not a mood. Cervantes’s remark about not thrusting his nose into other men’s porridge (Don Quixote, 1605) is about minding your own business. If you want something for a speech, sort by source grade and skip the oddities.
Most quoted on independence day:
Freedom, observes the philosopher, is potential launched into infinity.
The minute you locked yourself in ultimate certainty you lost a great deal of your freedom.
The road to freedom is paved with the courage of the oppressed.
It is always in the name of freedom that we dominate our fellow human beings.
The only freedom we have left is to choose whose orders to follow.
The struggle for freedom requires, first and foremost, a practical commitment.
Artists, the real ones, do not worry about censorship because they have the freedom to provoke.
I can be free, even beyond the struggle for freedom and what is forbidden.